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Book shows Durango as microcosm of women's advancement in athletics
Photo by YODIT GIDEY/Herald
Mary Ruth Bowman refers to her book, Those Darlin’ Demons, at her home Tuesday.
Just look at the photo, she'll tell you, on page 48 of her new book, Those Darlin' Demons: A Century of Girls Athletics in Southwest Colorado and the Effects of Title IX. The 1976 Durango High School girls swimmers are posing for a team photo. Most of the girls are smiling. Coach Bowman is the one on the far left, mouth wide. Caught in mid-sentence.
But let's be fair. Being vocal is not always a bad thing.
It was Bowman's and others' willingness to speak up that helped a generation of girls experience their share of athletic achievement. While women's strides in athletics often were slowed by hurdles thrown in front of them, people such as Bowman kept alive the struggle that ultimately paid off.
Beginning in 1972 with the inception of Title IX, signed into U.S. law by President Nixon, women's athletics gradually have risen to a par, or at least closer to a par, with men's.
"It changed the world," Bowman says of Title IX.
She wrote the book to chronicle girls sports here and show the effort that went into bringing equality to sports.
"These things didn't just drop from the sky," the 82-year-old former coach says. "An awful lot of us spent an awful lot of time" going to school board meetings, coaching teams and traveling across the state.
The book itself didn't drop from the heavens. Bowman took three-plus years to research the topic, to interview current and former DHS athletes and coaches, to look through every Toltec, the DHS yearbook, from 1911 to now.
The interviews were the fun part, she says.
"The writing is the worst part. It's torture," she says.
She had editing and design help from Katherine Burgess and Lisa Marie Jacobs.
The book sells for $15, and all proceeds go to the DHS Booster Club, girls athletics and the Toltec.
Bowman says her motivation comes from wanting to make sure others have what she had. She grew up in the Panama Canal Zone - then a U.S. territory, now part of Panama - with a recreation center right across the street and tennis courts nearby.
"I had every advantage in the Canal Zone," she says.
Her family moved to North Carolina, where she graduated high school and eventually met her husband on the university tennis courts at Chapel Hill.
Frank and Mary Ruth Bowman moved to Durango 50 years ago. The first thing you notice when you park alongside the house where they raised three sons is the ever-present tetherball pole on the sidewalk. It's there for the grandkids, for the neighbor kids, for anyone who wants to walk by and take a whack.
Inside, Mary Ruth Bowman keeps her 86 hats collected from near and far during her world journeys.
"I always felt that sports was good for marriage," she says. "When you play a sport, you have to learn how to win, and how to lose and how to play as a team. And with a marriage, you have to do the same thing."
In her 119-page book, Bowman chronicles the struggles of Durango women in athletics from 1905 to the present. She talks about the times when DHS girl students didn't have a lot of choices: band, pep club, cheerleading, or staying home. She emphasizes a 1959 photo (page 41) of the DHS pep club, 105 girls aligned neatly in six rows.
Bowman is not sad to have witnessed the pep club's demise. Title IX stated that schools must give women's sports equal opportunities to men's.
The battle was won, but the war continued. Bowman recalls that after Title IX was enacted, she and Dr. Craig Edgerton appeared before the school board to request a girls tennis team.
"They said, 'Oh, we can't do it.' And he said, 'What? We can do it. Title IX.'"
The first girls team took to the courts in the spring of 1974. Soon DHS had girls skiing, basketball, volleyball, track, cross country, swimming and, eventually, soccer, golf and softball. (Boys and girls skiing were dropped in 1981.)Girls still can be cheerleaders, they still can get pregnant, they still can ignore extracurricular activities. But at least now they have a choice, Bowman says.
"I'm happy as the devil," she says of the changes made.
In the three-plus decades since Title IX, school sports have changed, attendance at girls sports is up, the Olympics have changed, and, in a development Bowman believes is related, women are becoming doctors in nearly equal percentages as men.
"People, men in particular, look at women differently. People accept them much more."
Equality in athletics will be a constant battle, she believes.
"But it's going to be a lot easier."
johnp@durangoherald.comJohn Peel writes a weekly human-interest column.
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